Cinema Sideshow

[FILM] 'Eraserhead' and 'Lynch' at the Northwest Film Center

Long, long ago, in a far off land called the 1970’s, I was a geeky kid who loved movies. Unlike normal, non-cinema obsessed youth, my favorite part of the year wasn’t summer vacation – it was the weeks devoted to the Los Angeles Film Exposition (commonly called “Filmex”), the annual international festival that ran from 1971 to 1983 before morphing into the organization American Cinematheque.

For a budding film geek, having a Filmex pass was like being given free rein in a candy store filled with exotic treats from around the world. I’d ditch school and take a series of city buses to Century City every day for the length of the festival, grab a program, and cram as many movies into my day as possible. Choosing films based solely on the three or four sentences in the festival schedule, I gambled my time on movies from countries like Ireland, China and Cuba and on interesting-sounding American films that would likely never see wide distribution.

Which is how I first saw David Lynch’s freaky fever-dream Eraserhead. Three decades later, we know what to expect from Lynch, but in 1977 his beautiful, surreal, terrifying contemplation of urban anxiety was wholly new, and utterly baffling. The non-linear story uses Lynch’s personal brand of dream logic to tell the tale of a man named Henry (Jack Nance) whose girlfriend abandons him and their grotesquely deformed baby. While the baby’s in his care, Henry sleepwalks through a bizarre chain of interactions with increasingly strange characters.

As a young filmgoer fed on a regular diet of standard Hollywood genre-bound fare, I was floored. And I became a fan of Lynch forever, even when he’s at his most infuriating.

Now, what Eraserhead is actually about is anybody’s guess. Lynch himself has never fully explained it other than to say it reflects his anxieties while living on his own in an industrial part of Philadelphia. Critics have come up with numerous interpretations from parental fear to sexual dysfunction, but really it’s just the world’s greatest audition film – Lynch made the movie to show off what he was capable of as a filmmaker, and it got him noticed. After seeing Eraserhead, Mel Brooks contacted Lynch and offered him The Elephant Man, kicking off the director’s uneven-but-always-interesting career.

Watching Eraserhead for the first time is a revelation, a mind-altering experience in an utterly unique way of telling a story on film. Despite its incomprehensible storyline, Lynch’s masterful use of shadow, industrial sounds and grotesque imagery creates an inescapable feeling of dread in the viewer, a palpable sensation of being trapped inside someone else’s nightmare. It’s absolutely gorgeous to look at, even when the images are so awful that you want to look away.

Sporadically shown over the years in art house and repertory theaters, the film received a broader DVD release last year (previously it was available only through Lynch’s website) but it really ought to be experienced on the big screen. The Northwest Film Center is offering that experience this week, and you should take advantage of the opportunity, even if it leaves you jittery and scratching your head in confusion.

Playing with Eraserhead is Lynch, a new documentary that reveals the director to be obsessed with Transcendental Meditation, which he promotes to his cadre of worshipful protégés in between power walks. Direction is credited to “blackANDwhite,” who may be one of Lynch’s young in-house bootlicks or could really be Lynch himself, since this seems like the sort of thing he would do. Whoever directed it, it’s awful – tedious, unenlightening, and sluggishly paced. Skip it if you can.

On 'The Mist' and characterization

This is a busy season for film folk, what with catching up on all the movies we missed earlier in the year. But the staff took a field trip to the local multiplex and caught The Mist this weekend. And we have a few thoughts.

We won't spoil it for those of you who haven't seen it, but unless you live under a rock you've undoubtedly heard that the ending is a downer. And it is -- delightfully enough. It's a refreshing throwback to a time before studios "tested" every film before release, insisting that any ending that doesn't leave the test audience in a happy, toe-tapping mood has to be lightened up. Cinema Sideshow approves of this ending, depressing though it may be. Or, perhaps, because it's depressing. We're funny that way.

Overall, The Mist works very well, but it suffers from one of Stephen King's biggest flaws as a storyteller, and Frank Darabont's biggest flaws as a director -- the characters are all one-dimensional types, with not a one of them undergoing any noticeable growth during their journey. They exist almost in symbolic terms: The Everyman/Artist Hero, The Religious Zealot, The Redneck, The Feisty Old Lady, The Stubborn Guy Who Won't Listen to Reason. They're plot devices, not people.

This singularity of characterization means that King's characters don't always do things that make normal, human sense. They're puppets set in place to say and do things that serve the plot, as opposed to complex characters who make choices which drive the plot. This means that Andre Braugher, as The Stubborn Guy Who Won't Listen to Reason, eventually becomes utterly baffling to the viewer -- there's a point at which his behavior simply doesn't make any sense beyond the fact that King needed a guy to perform a certain action, so Stubborn Guy had to cling to his stubbornness no matter what.

In King's books, however, the writer has time to lay groundwork, and that goes a long way towards making up for the shallowness of his characters. The people in King's books may not be deep, but they do have backstories, and the best of King's works (like, say, "The Shining" and "The Stand") focus first on the people, then on the stuff that happens to them. Unlike some writers (Deen Koontz comes readily to mind), King isn't especially concerned with why evil happens -- his stories are about what people do after the evil shows up. For the reader, this creates first a) intimacy with the characters, then b) shared experience as The Bad Stuff Happens. King's books are often overly long, a little sloppy, and full of those broadly written types rather than complicated characters ... but he knows how to make you care about the people, if only because you learn all about them first so you're already identifying with them when the horror hits.

Frank Darabont's adaptations of King's works (The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile, The Mist) are, on the other hand, efficient in the extreme and don't leave a lot of room for ambiguity or subtlety. In The Mist, the Everyman/Artist Hero has to protect his child and, ultimately, attempt to lead a group to safety. This doesn't allow him any time to be concerned about the wife he left at home. The screenplay doesn't have any room for such minor issues, and Our Hero never shows a moment of worry about his wife's fate until he decides, almost as an afterthought, to swing by the house on his way out of town at the end of the film. Having been introduced to the family unit at the beginning of the movie, his complete disregard of her rang false -- and, ironically, it could have been fixed by just a couple of lines of dialogue, should Darabont have bothered to add them.

As a monster movie, The Mist is effective but it lacks the depth that could make it genuinely great. One can look at John Carpenter's The Thing, or Alien, or last year's Korean flick The Host -- or, hell, even Lake Placid -- and see that monster movies can feature well-crafted, multidimensional characters. When they do, the movie sticks with you, and it's even more effective while you're watching it.  As tense as The Mist was, at no point do we find ourselves caring a whit about the fate of the people in the film, and this hobbles any real emotional power that the story might otherwise have.

As a counterpoint to The Mist we'd offer 2005's The Descent, which spends enough time and effort on establishing the personalities of the people involved that the audience is genuinely concerned about what happens to them, then gradually ratchets up the tension so that the last third of the film is white-knuckle scary. If the The Mist was able to tease even a bit of that emotional investment out of the audience, it could stand as a truly top-notch monster movie. But instead it's a just a solid fast-food flick -- decently crafted, efficiently directed, but forgettable once the lights come back up.

Oscar Season.

The last couple of months of the year bring DVD bounty to film critics around the world, as studios send out bushels of screener discs in the hopes that their Oscar-bait projects will land on the countless top-ten lists that nobody really gives a crap about.

Here at Cinema Sideshow Central, we've received gratas copies of Reservation Road, Talk to Me, A Mighty Heart, Hairspray, Into the Wild, Margot at the Wedding, Music Within, Knocked Up, Eastern Promises, and a few more that we can't be bothered to remember. The daily mail/UPS/FedEx pile often includes bizarre extras that are intended to win us over, but serve instead to just clutter up our already cluttered desks -- Fox Searchlight, for example, sent us a DVD of The Kite Runner, plus a foldy card-thingie with stuff about the movie and a copy of the novel on which it was based, each in a separate mailing. The postage bills at Fox Searchlight must be enormous.

Catching up with all of these pictures is a daunting task, and after awhile they kind of start to run together. For an idea of what the experience is like, please enjoy this clip from The Soup, which captures it all quite nicely:

Review: The Bourne Ultimatum

The Bourne Ultimatum jumps straight into the action with indestructible überspy Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) injured and on the run in Moscow. There’s a lengthy chase scene with shaky cameras, insistently anxious music and killer fight segments, and it sets the stage for the hundred-odd minutes to come – this third installment in the franchise is short on plot and heavy on action. It’s a nerve-jangling thrill ride.

Director Paul Greengrass (United 93) returns to helm this possibly last film in the series, which brings back characters from the previous two pictures as the amnesiac Bourne gets closer than ever to finding out who he is, why he’s such a brilliant killer and who made him that way.

One notable addition to the cast is David Strathairn as a CIA chief with something to hide, and who has no qualms about assigning all of the CIA’s resources to killing Bourne. And the resources are impressive — the most sinister bad guy in Ultimatum is the post-9/11 international network of public cameras, and the ease with which government entities can listen in on cell phones and access computer files. Combined with Greengrass’ jittery pseudo-documentary style, the result is a paranoid roller coaster that feels as if it’s anchored firmly in real life.

Of course, Bourne remains a deliciously improbable character, a combination of James Bond, Jet Li and Remo Williams who can outfight, out-think and outrun any assassin his CIA masters throw at him. Damon’s boyish good looks have matured into a beefier sort of handsomeness, and he’s become much more believable in the role – but after the fourth or fifth spectacular car crash, it’s impossible not to giggle when Bourne escapes with just a few bruises. It’s a good sort of giggle, though.

While the film is somewhat slim on plot, that doesn’t mean that it’s lacking in character development or that it doesn’t tie up loose ends from the first two films. There’s an undercurrent of melancholy beneath the frenetic main story, as Bourne begins to remember his past and his conscience starts to kick in. As much killing-as-entertainment as there is in films like these, it almost feels subversive for Bourne to acknowledge that his adversaries don’t even know why they’ve been sent to kill him, and that he feels regret that he’s taken so many lives.

But viewers who come strictly for the action won’t be disappointed. The entire film is one long cat-and-mouse game, with Bourne jumping from Moscow to Madrid to Morocco, with a brilliantly designed set piece in each location.

Greengrass creates a consistently exciting, intelligent thriller that takes Jason Bourne to a perfect, inevitable conclusion – back to the beginning. If the series really does end here, it’s a satisfying conclusion. But there’s another Bourne book in Robert Ludlum’s catalog, so we may see the superspy one more time.

DVD Reviews: 300, Pathfinder, Starter for 10

300: Special Edition

As the capabilities for better, more detailed, more technically intricate computer graphic work are applied to motion pictures, directors are finding a wide range of uses for that technology as they bring their artistic visions to full-motion life. As with any artistic medium, especially one still in its infancy, some of those choices are positively painful to have to sit through. Robert Zemeckis' freakish motion-capture kids' flick The Polar Express, for example, was populated by characters who looked like they'd been embalmed, covered in latex, and then painted by slave laborers in a third-world sweatshop (his upcoming Beowulf  adaptation looks to be more  aesthetically pleasing, although it does beg the question of why he felt the need for hyper-realistically animated versions of Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie when he could have just, you know, filmed the real thing.) But some directors have found that advanced CGI techniques allow them to create worlds that would otherwise be impossible (or financially prohibitive) to film ... (Read more ...)

Pathfinder

Pathfinder (2007) would make a great double bill with  Mel Gibson's Apocalypto (2007). Both are about a dusky-skinned, loincloth-clad fellow running around in the woods and killing the evil white men that want to wipe out his people, and both offer a solid menu of slashing, hacking, stabbing, and gouging. Surprisingly, though, it's Apocalypto that wins when it comes to actual story, since Pathfinder doesn't really have one. At the top of the film, it looks like it might actually be about something — a Native American woman spies a white horse and follows it into the woods, where she comes across a broken-down, abandoned Viking vessel filled with dead bodies. She also finds a young boy, still alive, and she brings him back to her tribal village. Some of the elders don't want to take the boy in, what with all the legends about strangers and betrayal, but the council members ultimately decide to keep the kid around. Flash-forward ten years or so, and the boy, christened "Ghost," has turned into super-hunky Karl Urban ... (Read more ...)

Starter for 10

As a young boy in working-class Essex, England, sweet-faced, good-natured Brian Jackson (James McAvoy of The Last King of Scotland and The Chronicles of Narnia) yearned to be "clever," so he obsessively watched TV quiz shows like the popular "University Challenge" and filled his head with thousands of bits of assorted trivia. When he heads off to college in mid-1980s Bristol, he flounders a bit in an alien environment filled with weird roommates, protest rallies, and snotty grad students, but earns a place as an alternate for the school's University Challenge team.  He quickly makes friends with an opinionated, dark-haired girl with a political bent (Rebecca Hall) but becomes hopelessly smitten with a WASP-y blond who makes the quiz team (Alice Eve), leading to thoroughly predictable (but still delightfully entertaining) results. Produced under Tom Hanks' Playtone banner, Starter for 10 (2007) is very much in the mold of Hanks' That Thing You Do! (1996) — pleasant, funny, smarter than one would expect, and unchallenging in the most relaxing sense of the word ... (Read more ...)

New DVD reviews: Ivan's Childhood, Premonition, The Hills Have Eyes 2

Ivan's Childhood
Andrei Tarkovsky came of age as a filmmaker at what was, perhaps, the single best moment in time to make films in Russia. With Stalin out of power, the Soviets encouraged new opportunities for expression and experimentation in the arts throughout the 1950s and '60s, and young graduates of the VGIK film school entered the invigorated Moscow film industry armed with a creative freedom that had never before been allowed. For his first feature, 29-year-old Andrei Tarkovsky took on an adaptation of Vladamir Bogolov's novella "Ivan," a project that had already been completed by another director but badly mishandled.  (Read the rest of the review ...)

Premonition
Considering how problematic time-travel stories are to concoct, one wonders why screenwriters keep attempting it. Is the challenge — the idea that maybe, this time, it won't be utterly preposterous? Or is it ego on the part of the writer, a deeply held conviction that they can succeed where so many others have failed? For whatever reasons that it made it into production and onto neighborhood movie screens, Premonition (2007) is yet another film about someone unstuck in time which promises a ripping good puzzle and then stumbles over it own illogical plot contrivances. (Read the rest of the review ...)

The Hills Have Eyes 2
In looking for something good to say about The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2007), it's tempting to point out that the production values are very good — the film obviously had a decent budget, and there's some real artistry to the camerawork. Unfortunately, when a movie's as soulless, pointless, plotless, and utterly devoid of inspiration as this one, that's the equivalent of saying, "Well, at least it was in focus." Director Martin Weisz' primary experience has been that of making music videos for the likes of Korn, Nickelback, Brandy, and Sisqo (although his previous feature effort, the 2006 cannibal-killer flick Rohtenberg, had the distinction of being banned in Weisz' native Germany thanks to its graphic carnage) so, perhaps, he was unaware that longer-form films actually need plots. (Read the rest of the review ...)

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